How Do We Talk About God?

How Do We Talk About God? Jack Rogers My first General Assembly as a comm1ss10ner, 1971, had most of the dramatic elements that would occupy my attention for the next thirty years. We made very positive history by electing the first woman moderator of the Presbyterian Church in its 183-year history. We had been ordaining women as elders since 1930, but no woman elder had been elected moderator until Lois Stair, a highly competent and good humored elder from Wisconsin, was handed the gavel. She represented the solid core of women who, throughout history, had been doing much of the work of the church with little recognition. We made a decision that, from then on, opened the highest level of leadership in the Presbyterian community to women who make up over half its members. We also spent a great deal of time in 1971 talking about another woman. Her name was Angela Davis. This black woman was a Communist and was charged with complicity in a murder. The Council on Church and Race had made a grant of $10,000 to her legal defense fund. The issue for the members of the council was simply whether this black woman could get a fair trial. From the hours of debate at the assembly and the huge controversy that erupted in the church at large, it was clear that there were other issues. Should the church be involved in American society as an agent of change? At another level, for some people, the question was, perhaps, should the church be involved with people who disagree with us politically and are not part of our community? In a church that is 96 percent Caucasian and whose members dominantly vote Republican, what business do we have in being, in any way, related to Angela Davis? It was ultimately determined that the members of the Council of Church and Race had acted properly. They had followed all of the guidelines pertaining to grants. Even so, the members of the council repaid the $10,000 out of their own pockets. But that did not quell the controversy. For some people who lived through that era, the 183rd General Assembly is still known as the Angela Davis Assembly. The conflict between understanding the church as a place primarily for personal religion and seeing it as an agent of social involvement was so heightened at the 1971 assembly that it set a template of tension that persists to this day. We also began a process of reorganizing the church in 1971. I have lived through three major reorganizations since then and have been a participant in one of them. The result of the restructuring in 1971 was to take power away from staff leaders. We passed the proposal to reorganize in about ten minutes, since most of us did not really understand the implications of it. The issue of distrust 75 between the elected governing bodies and the staff that serve the church is an ongoing struggle. The difference between what I experienced at the assembly and the later reports about it sensitized me to the need to learn about issues in the church at first hand. It began my career as a "General Assembly junkie" that now extends to thirty-one assemblies. But at that first assembly I was overwhelmed with the mass of data, the complexity of the issues, the rapid pace of the business, and the depth of emotions displayed. I had an intuition then, and I am even more convinced now, that underlying all of these sociological, psychologieal, and political issues were bedrock theological concerns. How do we think and speak about God? How do we understand and interpret the revelation of God in the Bible? It is to these issues that we now turn. My personal history was at a decisive turning point in 1971. After teaching at a Presbyterian school, Westminster College in New Wilmington, Penn sylvania, for eight years, I accepted an invitation to teach philosophy of religion at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. Fuller was a non denominational, evangelical seminary about which I had known little. A visit convinced me that it was not a fundamentalist institution, as many thought. I decided I could learn and grow with the colleagues I met. I found that I was able to be my Presbyterian self. At my suggestion, Moderator Lois Stair was invited to address the students at Fuller, and she came. If one had taken a photograph of the people at Fuller Seminary in 1971, it would have looked pretty much like most theological seminaries prior to that time. There were twenty white men on the faculty. There were about 250 students in the School of Theology. Only two were women-both, I believe, in the two-year Master of Arts program. Underneath the surface, women's concerns were boiling. Students' wives were asking for more attention to their presence and role. Some of their hus bands, who were officers in the student government, came to me and asked me to teach a course on the subject of women's liberation. I responded that a woman should do that. They argued that there were no women faculty and that to have credibility the course had to be taught by a regular faculty member. (Notice who had the power and who decided what action was proper.) I was new and didn't know where I fit in the curriculum beyond my required course in philosophical theology. So, I agreed. My theory was that it was probably better to do something badly rather than not at all. Six people signed up for the course-the two women students, and some of the husbands who had agitated for it. The first night, fifty-eight people showed up, nearly all of them women. I felt the tension in the room. These women were not about to give me power over them by registering officially, but they wanted to know what was going on. For the next nine weeks, the attendance averaged more than fifty persons, with some nights reaching a hundred. I decided that first night that l would not "teach" the course. Instead, I convened, moderated, communicated data from outside sources, and invited 76 those with expertise to share it. Women carried the dis . cuss1on. All va 1ue Judgments and ethical dec1s1ons were the1rs to make. We ·d "fi d . h h . 1 enti 1e wit t e concerns of the women's hberat10n movement. I offered no crif . d . 1que. Th e most dIScouragmg part came m ea 1mg with the biblic 1 d t A h t point the attendance dropped by half. During the following wee~ I ;0~·call~ ~:d notes from many of the women who had absented themselves h · · Sh "d "I h b b h · 0 ne was c aractert~hc. e s~1 , ave e.en . eate~ overt e head with the Apostle Paul so many times that I JUSt couldn't nsk 1t agam." When we came to theological reconstruction, we needed to hear from a woman. The only feminist professor I could identify in the area was Patricia Doyle, from the neighboring School of Theology at Claremont, California. Claremont had a liberal reputation, just as Fuller wore a conservative label. I had no history with these characterizations, so I invited her to speak. She provided insights from a distinctly feminine perspective in a way that few men could have. She even said that men were also oppressed by the roles society assigned them. When a male anthropologist had earlier said the same thing, he was met with legitimate resistance, because it seemed like too easy a way to pass over the very real problems of women. Professor Doyle left us with two questions: ( 1) Can we appreciate the differences in persons without denying their equality? (2) Can we allow all persons to experience the wholeness that salvation offers? The reverberations of those questions continued in the student body and in my mind during the weeks that followed. I wrote an article about my experience for Presbyterian Life, published in July, 1972. It was titled, "Just Treat Them like Blacks: A White Male's Re sponse to Women's Liberation."2 I reflected: "I think that women are now asking to be treated like black people. They want to define their own roles rather than have us do it for them .... They want to be treated as persons, with the same opportunities, privileges, and responsibilities as other persons.',J It is hard to remember now how we in the church then were struggling with the movement for racial equality. For most of us, the issue of the genuine equality of women was less familiar still. Faculty and students at Fuller Seminary were quickly confronted with the reality of women seeking to study theology and desiring ministry in the church. In 1972, seventeen women enrolled. The next year there were fifty-three. It was a time of explosive growth in numbers and in racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. In five years, the seminary grew from 250 to 1,500 students, and at least 350 of them were women. By my second year at Fuller, I had identified some gaps I could fill in the curriculum. I offered a Wednesday evening course entitled Theological Models. It featured guest lecturers in areas not covered by the regular Fuller faculty. The dean gave me a modest budget so I could at least take these guests out to dinner. I brought in a Pentecostal theologian, an African American to explain black theology, and others to teach from their perspectives aspects of theology not covered by the Fuller faculty.

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